From Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle (Part One: 1876–1919)
Interesting Links
Thomas E. Miller: A Life in Service to Civil Rights (Douglas Ewbank, West Philadelphia Collaborative History)
“A Right Deferred: African American Voter Suppression after Reconstruction” (Marsha J. Tyson Darling, Gilder Lehrman Institute)
Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Destruction of a Free Ballot,” Joseph H. Rainey
• “Is Woman’s Suffrage a Failure?” Ida M. Tarbell
• “Literacy Tests: Southern Style,” Jack H. Pollack
• “The Evicted,” Fred Travis
Buy the book
Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle (Part One: 1876–1919)
List price: $37.50
Web store price: $31.50
Thomas E. Miller: A Life in Service to Civil Rights (Douglas Ewbank, West Philadelphia Collaborative History)
“A Right Deferred: African American Voter Suppression after Reconstruction” (Marsha J. Tyson Darling, Gilder Lehrman Institute)
Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Destruction of a Free Ballot,” Joseph H. Rainey
• “Is Woman’s Suffrage a Failure?” Ida M. Tarbell
• “Literacy Tests: Southern Style,” Jack H. Pollack
• “The Evicted,” Fred Travis
Buy the book
Jim Crow: Voices from a Century of Struggle (Part One: 1876–1919)List price: $37.50
Web store price: $31.50
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| “The Political Pinkertons,” by American political cartoonist Grant Hamilton (1862–1926) for the July 30, 1892, issue of Judge. A caption in the magazine reads: “The Northern press is unanimous in condemnation of the employment of Pinkertons against labor in the North, but who hears a word of protest from the Southern press against this band of organized bulldozers and murderers that sacrifices thousands of lives every year?” The various posters on the wall read: "Vote inside. No Negro votes taken. The Constitution gives the Negro the right to vote — but what care we for the Constitution — Voting done inside by whites only K.K.K." (Courtesy of the New York Public Library) |
It was the second—and last—speech Miller gave from the House floor as a member of Congress. He was one of the last five African American members of the House in the nineteenth century; no Black candidates would be elected to Congress from 1900 to 1928, and none from a Southern state until 1972. Miller ran in November 1888 in a Sumter County district that was more than 80% African American—gerrymandered to contain (and control) most of the region’s Black population. His opponent was the white Democratic incumbent, William Elliott, who claimed victory and was seated in the new Congress. Miller contested the election on the grounds that most Black voters had been prevented from casting ballots, and on September 23, 1890, with only a week remaining in the first session of the 51st Congress, the Republican-controlled House voted to seat him in Elliott’s place. For the remaining months of the term, he was the only Republican in the seven-member delegation from South Carolina.
That November, Miller defeated Elliot in an election rematch but lost the seat when the canvassing board in South Carolina threw out most of Miller’s ballots, allegedly for being improperly printed. He again contested the election results, but the new Congress, now controlled by Democrats, seated Elliott. Thus, although elected to two two-year terms as a congressman, Miller effectively served in the House only for the three-month session from December 1, 1890, to March 3, 1891. (Before the passage of the Twentieth Amendment, newly elected members were sworn in on March 4, and the House typically met for one “long session” of five to ten months and a “short session” that usually took place the three months before the next Congress was sworn in.)
Thomas Ezekiel Miller was born in South Carolina in 1849 and raised by Richard and Mary Miller, a couple recently freed from slavery. Rumors about his parentage trailed him for much of his life; in 1936, he told an interviewer that he had learned that his biological father came from a wealthy white family and that his light-skinned mother was “said to be” the mixed-race daughter of Judge Thomas Heyward Jr., one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, whose family controlled one of the largest slaveholdings in the country. Thomas’s biological parents may have been separated by their families to avoid scandal, and he was then given to the Millers. During one Republican primary, his darker-skinned opponent all but accused him of passing for African American and claimed Miller was only “one-sixty-fourth Black.”
As a teenager, Miller distributed newspapers on the railroad, working his way up to assistant conductor on the Savannah-Charleston line. When the Confederate Army took control of the railroads, employees were required to wear the uniform, and he was eventually captured by Union forces and spent two weeks in a Savannah prisoner camp. After the war, he moved north, eventually enrolled at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and graduated in 1872. He then returned home to study law at the newly integrated University of South Carolina, where he graduated with the last class before Democrats assumed power in the state and shut down the university. (It reopened three years later as an all-white agricultural college.) During the 1870s and 1880s, he served several terms in the state legislature before running for Congress.
The 1888 election had given the Republicans simultaneous control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives for the first time since 1875, and they launched a renewed effort to protect black suffrage in the South from fraud and discrimination. The Federal Elections Bill proposed by Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts would authorize federal officials to supervise voter registration, polling procedures, and ballot counting in congressional elections. The bill passed the House, 155–149, on July 2, 1890, with no Democrats voting in favor. When the Senate finally took up the bill in December, it was filibustered by the Democrats. During this stalemate, Democrats in the House tried to attach to an army appropriations bill a sham amendment prohibiting the use of federal troops at polling places—something that Lodge’s bill did not even authorize—and in response Miller delivered his first Congressional speech, which we present below. On January 22, 1891, the Senate voted, 35–34, to postpone further debate on the Federal Elections Bill, and it was never again brought up for consideration.
After leaving Congress, Miller served one last term in the state assembly and then convinced his longtime political nemesis Benjamin Tillman, an outspoken white supremacist elected to two terms as governor and four terms as U.S. Senator, to support the establishment of a new all-Black land-grant institution, the Colored Normal, Industrial, Agricultural, and Mechanical College (now South Carolina State University). Miller agreed to leave politics, and he served as the school’s president for fifteen years. He died at the age of 88 in 1938. On his gravestone is inscribed, “I served God and all the people, loving the white man not less, but the Negro needed me most.”
Notes: Miller refers to a speech given by John Hemphill, a Democrat from South Carolina and the opposition floor leader the previous summer during the House debate on the elections bill. Hemphill’s harangue had argued that the bill was crafted to put “the colored man” in “control of the government of the Southern States.” Byron M. Cutcheon, who yielded to Miller to allow him to continue speaking past his time limit, was a Republican from Michigan.
Miller also makes several comments about the newly elected South Carolina governor, Benjamin Tillman. In his inaugural address, delivered on December 4, 1890, Tillman said, “We deny, without regard to color, that ‘all men are created equal;’ it is not true now and was not true when Jefferson wrote it.” Miller also opposed Tillman’s plans for decimating state-funded public education; the governor proposed repealing the amendment to the South Carolina state constitution adopted in 1878 that provided for the levying of a 0.2% state property tax in support of public schools, and he opposed state support of The Citadel and called for the University of South Carolina to be stripped of its agricultural and mechanical department and reorganized as a smaller, more elite college.
Miller also makes several comments about the newly elected South Carolina governor, Benjamin Tillman. In his inaugural address, delivered on December 4, 1890, Tillman said, “We deny, without regard to color, that ‘all men are created equal;’ it is not true now and was not true when Jefferson wrote it.” Miller also opposed Tillman’s plans for decimating state-funded public education; the governor proposed repealing the amendment to the South Carolina state constitution adopted in 1878 that provided for the levying of a 0.2% state property tax in support of public schools, and he opposed state support of The Citadel and called for the University of South Carolina to be stripped of its agricultural and mechanical department and reorganized as a smaller, more elite college.
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For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below.
You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.
For this week’s selection, we depart from the usual format and reproduce the selection, in its entirety, below.
You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.
Speech in Congress on the Elections Bill
Mr. MILLER. Mr. Chairman, it is late in the day and in the session, but some things are being said to which I should like to reply. To hold office is a precious gift, and the race to which I belong are desirous of it, but there are gifts superior to office. Gentlemen talk about the North and about its not giving negroes representation on their tickets. That is not the thing we are suffering most from in the South.
There are other things of more importance to us. First is the infernal lynch law. That is the thing we most complain of. It is a question whether when we go to work we will return or not. Second, they have little petty systems of justices who rob us of our daily toil, and we can not get redress before the higher tribunals. Third, we work for our task-masters, and they pay us if they please, for the courts are so constructed that negroes have no rights if those rights wind up in dollars and cents to be paid by the white task-masters.
They speak about pure elections and call the election law a force law. Do not gentlemen from the South boast here in their speeches that it is the white man’s right to rule and to control elections, and if they can not control them by a majority vote they will control them by force or fraud? Take the speech delivered by my colleague from South Carolina [Mr. HEMPHILL], and you will see his brazen-faced boast that it is his right to remain here even without votes; and then when we have an appropriation bill the North is to be taunted with not giving negroes representation upon their tickets.
Yes, gentlemen, we want office; but the first and dearest rights the negro of the South wants are the right to pay for his labor, his right of trial by jury, his right to his home, his right to know that the man who lynches him will not the next day be elected by the State to a high and honorable trust; his right to know that murderers shall be convicted and not be elected to high office, and sent abroad in the land as grand representatives of the toiling and deserving people.
These are rights that we want; and we call upon you gentlemen of the North to speak for us and ask the Chamber over yonder to give us an election law — not a force law — a national law, Mr. Chairman, that will compel the people of the South to register the votes of the negro and the white man alike, and count them as they are cast, and let the wishes of those people in this American country be expressed here by duly elected Representatives of their States. [Applause on the Republican side.]
The sickly sentiment about not giving negroes positions in the North! The negroes of the North have their schoolhouses. Taxes are levied and schoolhouses supported. What do we find in South Carolina, where the Democrats rule? First, the newly elected governor, who claims to stand upon the platform of Jefferson’s principles, denies that all men are born free and equal and endowed with equal rights by their Creator. In his annual message to the Legislature he asks for the annihilation of the public-school system which is bringing South Carolina out of the bog of ignorance that she is in to-day and fast placing her along in the phalanx of other States in prosperity.
The CHAIRMAN. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. CUTCHEON. I yield the gentleman five minutes more of my time.
Mr. MILLER. Why, Mr. Chairman, the governor in his annual message, to re-establish ignorance, desires to close the schoolhouse door against the poor children by creating class schools. Yes; that is the way. What does he recommend? He recommends that the constitutional guaranty of a 2-mill tax be abolished; that communities be left to themselves to levy school taxes; and to the community shall also be left the right to say whether the education of the rich man’s son or the education of the poor man’s son shall be supported by the taxes levied. How do they seek to do it? The largest taxpayers are those people generally who have not many children; and as they are compelled by the State law to pay a tax, it is to be left to them whether it shall be used to educate the poor man’s child or whether it shall be used to educate their children. It amounts to having no educational system at all and is the destruction of the school system down there. Then they come North and speak about the bitterness of sectionalism, while right there in our Southland country, for want of experience, the governor of South Carolina recommends the destruction of the school system, which has been erected upon the promise of universal education.
What else does he do? He recommends the abolishment of two colleges established, by my assistance, to educate the white young men that they may know how to lead the old State up out of poverty and ignorance. Ah, gentlemen, what we need in this land is not so many offices. Offices are only emblems of what we need and what we ought to have. We need protection at home in our rights, the chiefest of which is the right to live. First, the right to live, and next the right to own property and not have it taken from us by the trial justices. I will read you an illustrative chapter, if gentlemen will allow me the time. A Democratic lawyer from my State, Mr. Monteith, speaking about the trial-justice system as sustained by the Democratic party of that State, says that under it no man is secure in his rights, and he gives a picture like this.
I hope gentlemen will listen. A negro was employed to plow for a white man for $10 a month. This man had a game hen. The hen was lost, and simply because the negro was plowing there he was assumed to be guilty of stealing her, was tried and sentenced to imprisonment, and they chained him by his hands to the plow, but before the thirty days of his sentence expired the good old game hen, with fourteen chicks, came out from under the barn where she had been “setting.” [Laughter and applause.] The same gentleman gives another illustration which will bring the blush of shame to the face of every white man. A negro woman, in the absence of her husband, got into a dispute with a white neighbor concerning a boundary line, a question which the trial justices have no right to settle; but they take such a question when it comes before them and whip it around and whip it around until they manage to work it into a criminal case. They put this woman on trial in his absence, and, although her attorney pleaded that she was in a condition in which women can not go to court, she was tried, convicted, and sentenced; and a white constable went to her house, two hours after she had become a mother, dragged her from a sick bed and carried her 15 long miles, to the very seat and center of the intelligence of our State, old Columbia. There, to the honor of the jailer and his white wife, they called together several women, white and black, and they ran that inhuman constable away from the jail and took the poor woman and made her an object of charity.
These are some of the outrages that are inflicted upon my people in the Southland which this “force” bill, as you call it, will protect them from; because, if we get it, instead of seeing South Carolina represented as she has been in this Congress by seven Democrats, you will find six or seven Republicans here. The offices will not go around among the Democrats, and then the spirit of fight that made them secede will make them break up the Democratic party and we shall have peace. [Applause on the Republican side.]
Originally published in the Congressional Record, 51st Congress, 2nd Session.